


the picture in reverse

by variative



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, Deus Ex Machina, Gay Richie Tozier, Internalized Homophobia, Love, M/M, Swimming, Turtles, but he gets better!, gay childhood love and its poetics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-10-12 15:44:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20566844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/variative/pseuds/variative
Summary: Richie opened his eyes. That was the first unexpected thing. He was underwater. That was the second.The light was diluted and green. His vision was strangely clear, even though he was underwater and his glasses were nowhere. Eddie was drifting nearby, his eyes open and dark and fixed. Tiny silvery fish darted around his face, and a turtle swam ponderously between them and vanished into the green. Richie swam closer, scattering the minnows, until their noses nearly touched. Eddie blinked slowly and a tiny bubble, formerly trapped in his eyelashes, escaped towards the surface.





	the picture in reverse

**Author's Note:**

> i've only watched the movies, and kind of know a little bit about the book, so if something doesn't jive with the book and seems like it should don't come for me

“No! We can still help him!”

It was Ben that caught him. Kind, strong Ben who looked like he was about to shit himself, or maybe cry; his hand closed on Richie’s wrist. Then Bill’s, and Bev’s, trying to pull him away, when he needed to get back to Eddie. Deep down in his bones he needed to get back to Eddie and believing was knowing was true down there, and they’d just killed a fucking demon clown through the power of friendship, so he had to get back to Eddie.

“We can still help him,” Richie said. Even he couldn’t hear himself over the noise, so he screamed it. They weren’t listening, he knew that too, they would never listen and never understand. He wrenched desperately at their grip, twisted to face them and suddenly found himself with one hand free; then Bill got him by the shoulders again. Panic whited out everything he was and Richie drew his free hand across his body and backhanded Bill across the face. He didn’t mean to and for a moment he thought _holy fuck! I’m in so much trouble!,_ but in that instant Bill’s grip went slack and Richie yanked himself away, slipping free. 

A thunderous crash echoed through the chamber as the earth pulled up like a carpet, the sound pounding though Richie’s chest like a physical blow, and then something actually hit him, right in the side of the head, knocked him sideways and made the world blinding white and then blinding dark. The floor surged up and hit him, and after a moment the black spots faded but still he couldn’t see. One eye was hot and wet and stung like hell, and through the other the world was just a seamless mass of gray spitting grit in his face. He couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t move, the floor was holding him down—but the others’ hands weren’t on him anymore. He heard them shouting but only distantly. Richie pushed the floor away, scrambling to get himself in a direction that his brain couldn’t quite persuade him was up. Eddie was close, Eddie was where Richie needed to be, and then there he was!—the sole of his sneaker a revelation against the back of Richie’s hand.

“Eds,” he said, or tried to, choking on dust and spitting blood. He crawled up Eddie’s body like a drowning man pulling himself out of a river of shit. There was blood slicking Eddie’s neck and it was coppery and still warm on Richie’s mouth. He sobbed into Eddie’s neck and said his name over and over. This was a place where what you believed was what was true and he tried so hard to believe. He tried so hard for a moment he thought Eddie’s chest moved but then he started crying again and fucked it up, he fucked it up—he let the universe find out that deep down he didn’t believe it. 

“Let it be me instead,” he said, and believed that he wanted it but couldn’t believe that it would come true. It had been the hardest thing in the world to make himself know that he was killing Pennywise, that It was really dying and it wasn’t just some sick joke, that the punchline wasn’t waiting around the corner to knock them all flat. And he tried so hard, but Richie just didn’t have any more believing in him. The punchline had hit after all, and it was a fucking doozy.

He couldn’t hear the voices of the other Losers at all anymore, just a low annihilating roar that seemed like it was coming from the ground and the walls and the sky most of all. He tried to cover Eddie with his body, and then the world fell down, and he was falling too—no, that wasn’t right. He wasn’t falling. He was sinking.

###

Richie opened his eyes. That was the first unexpected thing. He was underwater. That was the second.

The light was diluted and green. His vision was strangely clear, even though he was underwater and his glasses were nowhere. Eddie was drifting nearby, his eyes open and dark and fixed. Tiny silvery fish darted around his face, and a turtle swam ponderously between them and vanished into the green. Richie swam closer, scattering the minnows, until their noses nearly touched. Eddie blinked slowly and a tiny bubble, formerly trapped in his eyelashes, escaped towards the surface. 

“Eddie,” Richie said. Air came out of him in a bright cloud of bubbles, briefly obscuring everything; when he finished blinking them out of his eyes Eddie was still there.

Eddie opened his mouth and a garbled noise issued forth along with his own stream of air. He jerked in surprise like it was all well and good that Richie should have air in his lungs, but what was it doing coming from his body? Then he laughed, and Richie laughed and tried not to laugh and reached up and covered Eddie’s mouth with his hand, trying to keep the bubbles inside even though they were so beautiful in the clear green water. But they couldn’t stop laughing, air tickling Richie’s palm and creeping through his fingers, and then Eddie gasped, his chest moving against Richie’s, pulling in water. No more air came out of him but he kept laughing and then smiling said very clearly, “Richie.”

Richie cackled. Water filled his lungs and he pushed it out, forced it through his vocal cords and realized that he had nothing to say. A sort of low groan like whale-song emerged from him. They were naked. Their legs tangled. Their fingers tangled. Richie laughed again.

###

In another life during the summer that Richie turned thirteen (and almost died, and killed a fucking clown) he climbed into Eddie’s window with a skinned knee and hands that wouldn’t stop shaking, and convinced him to steal some of Ms. K’s gin. They got drunk quickly and it was hot in Eddie’s room; the breeze coming in the open window was humid and only halfway cool. Richie started to cry when Eddie asked him (for the fifth time since Richie had tumbled onto his carpet, but the first time since the room had started spinning for Richie) what had happened that got him so rattled. It shocked both of them and Richie was so intensely mortified that he tried, wasted, to climb back down the trellis and run away. He didn’t get far, and when he found himself pinned on the floor by Eddie he leaned in and kissed him.

In another life during the summer that Richie turned sixteen he told Eddie that he thought he might be gay. Eddie got weirded out and panicky, and ran off, and Richie spent nearly a full day mourning their friendship by playing his new R.E.M. LP about a billion times in a row and hating himself savagely. Then Eddie showed up at his house and everything was fine again, and they didn’t talk about it again until they were eighteen and about to leave for college, and then they did leave, and forgot each other.

In another life they kissed each other as kids and got married as adults when it became legal in New York and lied outrageously when people asked how they met each other. They never decided whether it was hilarious and perfect or strange and maybe a little scary that in truth they didn’t remember how they’d met. The argument lasted as long as their marriage, which was to say as long as they lived, so they traded positions from time to time for variety’s sake.

In another life, at the beginning of the world an alien super-predator or cosmic horror or evil angel never fell to the earth, and Richie had an ordinary awful childhood, and he spent many of his adult years trying to forget most of it. But not all of it. Not every part.

So many other lives he could have lived, and he was stuck with this one.

In the life that was, Richie lifted his head. Dried blood flaked off his cheek. He looked around, but the world was pitch black, so he put his head back down on Eddie’s chest.  Eddie’s arm moved. His hand settled flat between Richie’s shoulder blades.  Richie closed his eyes. Tears spilled down his cheeks and dripped off his nose. He was afraid to try to look again, he was afraid to move. The body under him was cold. Then, after an interminable amount of time in the pure and hellish darkness, it wasn’t. Richie kept his head down because he was still scared. A little bit later, Eddie’s chest rose and fell.

“Where the fuck are we, Trashmouth,” he said. 

His voice was like gravel. It was the most beautiful and terrifying sound Richie had ever heard. All at once he decided that the life he had wasn’t so awful, actually, even if his heart was pounding and he was a little afraid that he had pissed or would piss himself. He was getting used to that feeling again.

“Jesus,” he said, sitting up carefully. Every part of his body that could possibly hurt did, even his teeth, and it was a glorious sensation. Light bloomed: the flashlight in Eddie’s lap. It felt like it took an era and a half for the spots to clear from his vision, but when it did, a miracle: Eddie blinked up at Richie in the dust-choked yellow glow, eyes glassy and confused and undeniably alive. There was only one small problem, but Richie wasn’t going to split hairs. Still, he carefully didn’t look at Eddie’s chest. “Welcome back to the party, Eds.”

A tiny scowl wrinkled Eddie’s brow. “Don’t call me that,” he said, sitting up. “Did we kill it?”

“Don’t you remember,” Richie said, “When we were kids you gave me special permission to call you Eds?”

“I definitely didn’t.”

“Yes you did,” Richie said. “Eds. I guess all your memories haven’t come back yet. Probably for the best. I guess you don’t remember the time you walked in on me and your—”

“Shut up. Did we kill It or not?”

Richie swallowed and looked down, skirting his gaze around Eddie’s torso until he was staring safely at the ground. “Yeah,” he said. “We trash-talked that fucker to death and then stood in a circle and squeezed Its heart to goo with our bare hands. If I’d known it was that easy I would have… I…” His throat closed up. Something that felt like guilt or maybe rage twisted so violently in his chest that for a moment he wondered if he was going to throw up.

“Sounds like I missed out,” Eddie said, like he hadn’t noticed.

Richie realized that the funny gasping noise he was hearing was coming from himself. “Yeah. You sure did.”

Slowly, painfully, with a groan, but still impossibly and beautifully, Eddie pushed himself to his feet. He looked around and then stared at Richie. “Where are the others?”

“I don’t know,” Richie told him carefully. “They got out.”

“And left us here? Assholes.” But Eddie wasn’t really paying attention. He was picking his way over the rubble left in the aftermath of the insane upwards vortex that sucked up everything left of It. The flashlight wasn’t much, but it was enough to see that there were deep gouges and craters in the floor now where the glassy black rock had been pulled out of the ground, and the walls seemed twice as close, the ceiling a quarter as high.

“Eddie,” Richie called, suddenly afraid. He pushed himself upright, staggered, and then Eddie was there, holding him up until the world stopped spinning. “I have a concussion,” he said stupidly. “And you… you’re—yeah. We should get out of here.”

“No shit, asshole,” Eddie bitched. His shoulder was sturdy under Richie’s head, not delicate at all; he’d known it all along, hadn’t he? Eddie wasn’t delicate at all. “It would help if we knew where we were.”

“We do,” Richie said, reluctantly straightening up. “We haven’t moved. It just crumpled a little when It died. Just squeezed in a bit. Downsized. Sucked in its belly and—”

“Beep beep, Richie.”

“Right.” He closed his mouth and took the flashlight instead. He had a vague sense that they were facing in approximately the correct direction. He took three steps and then hesitated.

“No.” Eddie came up behind him in the dark and touched his wrist. “This way.”

It wasn’t at Neibolt, like Richie had expected, but at the Barrens that they eventually emerged, out through the web of ordinary, unpleasant caves and sewers into a rich, humid night (just like the one in the other life where Richie got drunk and—he cut off that thought viciously). But it was a beautiful night. The air felt clean and alive. The moon was bright and it was easy to see, even when Eddie turned off the flashlight. They walked in the same direction without discussing it or talking other than to say to one another, “Alright to—?” “Yeah. You?” “Yeah.” Then they went on in silence. It spoke to years of deep and habitual friendship—which Richie had only just remembered and which felt a little like they’d happened to someone else entirely, despite the impressive volume and intensity of his feelings about them—that both of them knew where they were going without having to say anything about it or even look at each other.

The quarry had changed a little, of course, just like the rest of Derry: smaller than Richie expected-slash-remembered, and mostly shut down. There was a sign now, and a metal gate, probably thanks to growing adult concern about all the wrong things, or a group of kids who got too drunk too late and didn’t make it home in one piece, or maybe both. Richie and Eddie climbed over the gate and took off their shoes and pants and overshirts. Richie kept his eyes on the ground; then they stood on the edge, and he looked at the water, even though out of the corner of his eye he could see Eddie’s body glowing pale as a ghost in the moonlight.

“This is so unsafe,” Eddie said at last, unenthusiastically. “There could be any amount of underwater obstructions down there. There’s no lifeguard. I don’t know CPR. Do you know CPR?”

“No,” Richie said. He stared down at the water and felt as concussed and exhausted and forty as he’d ever felt in his life; he’d used up all his bravery, and he wasn’t going to be the first one to jump.

“Alright,” Eddie said. “Fuck it then.” His hand clasped Richie’s wrist, a touch that was so hardly there that he didn’t even sway when he was pulled from Eddie’s grasp as he leapt. But Richie had to jump then, anyway.

The fall was longer than he remembered, and he hit hard, the soles of his feet and his upper right arm slapping painfully onto the surface. But the water wasn’t as cold as he expected, and he sank deep. Down there it was dark dark dark, none of the light he’d dreamed about, nothing like his memories; they’d never gone swimming at night before. He sank, losing air, and that was also different than in his dream, the bubbles catching the faint, filtered moonlight, Eddie’s limbs flashing in that same light as he treaded water above.

Pressure locked around his chest; he pulled himself back up to the surface. His heart was pounding. He broke the surface, blind and gasping. Miraculously his glasses were still on, but knocked askew. He wiped water from his face, pushed his hair back and straightened his glasses. The world came back into view.

“Hey,” Eddie said. He was very close, very very close, and Richie actually reared back a little in shock, his foot lashing out to propel himself back and sliding against Eddie’s calf.

Undeterred, Eddie swam closer. He was a better swimmer than Richie, he remembered; Eddie was treading easily with his legs while Richie had to concentrate on the uncoordinated paddling of his hands and feet in order to keep his face out of the water. One hand skidded across Eddie’s chest and he flinched wildly and nearly went under, but there was no wound—there was no wound! Nothing to even suggest that he’d been gored or recently returned from the—well anyway, Richie thought, scared to have the other thought in his head, for jinxing and karmic reasons. Just coarse body hair and warm skin, not even a scar. Richie finally looked. Eddie’s chest was pale and whole, if a little skinny, and the sight of it was unmaking. 

Eddie’s hand traveled over the surface of the water and came to rest on Richie’s shoulder. “You okay there, Trashmouth?”

Richie thought about it. “Yeah,” he said at last, drifting closer. There wasn’t room for his awkward paddling motions between them, so he held onto Eddie’s shoulders instead, and Eddie let go so he could scull with his hands and keep them up in the water. “I’m fine, Eds.”

“Me too,” Eddie said. He was so close and Richie’s heart was pounding so hard that he blushed, mortified and irrationally certain that Eddie could hear him. It seemed like they had drifted even nearer, like if Richie moved forward an inch more they would be in each other’s skin.

“Good,” Richie said. He meant it; he meant that one word maybe more than anything he’d ever said in his life, and he’d just shit-talked an evil clown to death with the power of believing in himself.

But then, disappointment: Eddie leaned back and Richie’s hands slid from his shoulders, his hips came up, and he drifted away, propelling himself towards the shallow side of the quarry with an easy stroke. Richie flushed hot all over in upset, and had to sit and stew alone for a moment before he followed.  He paddled up to Eddie, who was waiting for him on the big sitting rock near the shore. Richie pulled himself onto the rock and had to look again just to make sure, just in case it had been a trick of the water or the light. But it was the same as before: just Eddie’s chest, no massive lethal trauma site anywhere to be found.

“I want to tell you something, now that it’s over,” Eddie said. It was the worst thing he could have possibly said; Richie nearly fainted on the spot.

“Tell me,” Richie said, trying desperately to be cool and not feeling forty at all anymore. What he felt was like it had been at fourteen, when every day had been an agony, every instant a battle of self-control between Richie’s need to keep his friend and his desire to be more than friends and the unbearable leaden weight of his secret in his mouth—calculating whether it would be alright if he touched Eddie’s knee, if he flicked the side of his head, if he didn’t make enough fun of Eddie, if he made too much fun of Eddie—would it seem gay, would he look too interested, every casual touch the opposite of casual and nothing innocent even though everything was, love and paranoia seeping though his every waking moment.

“I’m not going back to Myra,” Eddie said; he leaned back on one elbow in the water, cocking a knee, and Richie was so taken with the pose that it took a minute for the words to penetrate.

“What,” he said vacantly, and then his brain caught up to his ears, and he experienced bitter dismay all over again. “I mean, good,” he said, recovering as best he could. “Now she and I can finally celebrate our love in the open.”

Which, fuck, that cut, completely by accident. He hoped Eddie didn’t notice even as he searched Eddie’s face for the barest hint of a reaction, any sign that the thought of being forced to love in secret all your life hit for him the way it did for Richie.

Eddie pursed his lips, and Richie fell back, defeated; that could have meant anything. “Beep beep, Trashmouth,” he snapped. “Are you going to listen to me or not?”

“Sorry sorry,” Richie said, even though it tasted a little bitter in his mouth. “Listening.”

“Right,” Eddie said, rolling his eyes, which was kind of a good point since he wasn’t wearing anything except a pair of Fruit of the Loom boxer briefs and also had recently—well, yep. It was a fair assumption, that Richie was having a little trouble listening. It also reminded Richie of something; he scooted closer to Eddie and put his arm around his shoulders. Eddie resisted a little at first, but Richie ignored that, because he wasn’t going to let a little thing like respecting Eddie’s prickliness keep him from celebrating the miraculous fact that Eddie Kaspbrak, the one and only, was here and alive and whole, against all the odds, the previous evidence of Richie's senses, and the laws of nature themselves. And after a moment, as Richie had known that he would, Eddie grumbled and leaned into Richie’s side. Their heads tipped together. Richie reached across Eddie’s chest and took his own hand, trapping Eddie in the loose circle of his arms, and Eddie’s elbow hooked around his knee. There they were: a circle of warmth and safety and big inconvenient love at the center of dark water and moonlit night, no getting in, no getting out.

“So tell me about Myra,” Richie said grudgingly. Their thighs were touching—Eddie’s was big and hairy and solid, a grown man’s thigh, and Richie wanted to see what else of him belonged to a grown—nope, nope! Nope. He did, obviously, but he wasn’t going to think about it right then, or some really inconvenient truths might come to light—despite everything that had happened, the cold water and the concussion and the exhaustion and the adrenaline crash, Richie wasn’t taking any chances. It wasn’t as hard—heh—as difficult as he’d been briefly afraid it would be, to think about other things; in fact he discovered that it was fully possible to just enjoy the feeling of Eddie’s body pressed against his with the purest and most straightforward feeling of relief and love and happiness.

“Ugh,” Eddie said; Richie quietly, selfishly, celebrated. “She was—well, I don’t know. I guess the important thing is that I realized, being back in Derry, that she was… well. She was just—she wasn’t good for me. She isn’t.”

“Derry made you realize that,” Richie said doubtfully.

“Well—maybe having my memories back,” Eddie said, and Richie felt a little guilty for pushing, since Eddie was so obviously struggling with it. “I don’t know. I just know I can’t—” A shudder ran though his body and into Richie’s. 

“Yeah,” Richie said swiftly. He hesitated and then said, “Don't go home after this. Come to L.A. with me. You’ve gotta get away from her, you don’t need another woman like that in your life. Always fussing. In fact—in fact, you don’t need anyone who doesn’t see you for the incredible badass that you are.”

Eddie snorted a surprised laugh. “An _incredible_ badass?”

“For sure,” Richie told him. “You saved me. You javelined a demon clown in the face. Also, you stabbed—”

“I stabbed Henry Bowers with a knife I’d just pulled out of my _face,”_ Eddie exclaimed. “That was _crazy._ Out of everything that’s happened I think that’s the craziest.”

Richie swallowed. “No,” he said. “It’s not.”

Eddie took a breath, and Richie thought he was going to say something, but he didn’t at all. He let it out slowly and then was quiet for a long time. Richie let go of him and put his hands in the water, dragging his fingers across the surface and studying intensely the pattern of ripples he made.

“What did you see,” Eddie said at last, so abruptly and after so long sitting in total silence that Richie jumped, “In the deadlights?”

“Oh, man,” Richie mumbled, ducking his head. He rubbed his temples, and Eddie put a hand on his shoulder. Richie swallowed hard and wondered if he was going to be sick again or if he was just still woozy from the head blow. “I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“Was it a premonition?” Eddie asked. “Like Bev saw?”

“No,” Richie said, shaking his head. “It was just a nightmare.”

“Are you sure?”

“The fuck kind of question is that,” Richie snapped. “Yes, I’m sure, okay? It wasn’t—it was just a nightmare. It was just trying to freak me out. It didn’t have anything to do with us.” Which wasn’t really true at all, but that didn’t mean it was a fucking prophecy.

“Really,” Eddie said, so drippingly dubious that Richie almost screamed.

“Yes! Last time I checked, the queer who got murdered by Pennywise wasn’t in the Loser’s club!” 

Eddie was ominously quiet.

“What,” Richie snapped. He wanted to eat his words.

“It’s just…” Eddie paused, licked his lips, and then said with obvious hesitancy, “You’re gay, aren’t you? Richie?”

Richie didn’t say anything. He felt like he was being roasted over a slow fire, mortification and shame cooking him from the inside out. “Man,” he said at last, shrugging out of Eddie’s grasp, “I don’t know you like that.”

“Yes, you do,” Eddie said. “Asshole.”

“I’m the asshole?” Richie burst out, furious with indignation and shame. “You’re the asshole, asshole! You’re really gonna ask me that? Fuck you!” He had no idea how to express to Eddie exactly how he felt about getting the third degree from him, the worst person to ask, vis a vis being a faggot or otherwise. So he splashed water as hard as he could into Eddie’s face.

Eddie flinched and sputtered, coming up glittering wet and angry. “Fuck _you! _Are you kidding me?” He planted his hands on Richie’s shoulders and shoved, hard, and Richie yelped and slid straight off the rock into water deeper than his head, and went straight under.

It was pitch black. The shadow of the rock was a terrifying chasm. He lunged upwards, and Eddie caught him at the surface and pulled him back onto the rock.

“Sorry,” Eddie was saying, “Sorry, Richie, sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Richie gasped. He was clutching at Eddie, and Eddie was holding onto him just as tight. He spat and gasped again. “I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re right, I had no right to ask you that…”

“It’s okay.” Richie let go; Eddie didn’t, still holding onto his shoulders. Richie stared down at the water. His knee was touching Eddie's thigh. “It was just—it was hard, growing up. You know?”

“Yeah,” Eddie said in a strange flat voice. “I know.”

“I’m sorry,” Richie said again, feeling miserable and embarrassed.

“Okay,” Eddie said, his breath hissing out between his teeth, but he squeezed Richie’s shoulders a little. Richie shivered, pretended it was from the cold. Then he realized that he was cold. He hesitated, shivered again so hard his teeth chattered, and then leaned against Eddie, pressing into his warmth. Gratitude warmed him too, when Eddie didn’t seem to mind it, when in fact he put his arms around Richie and rocked him back and forth and then kissed the top of his head.

“The others probably think we’re dead,” Richie said. He felt Eddie rest his cheek against Richie’s hair, his stubble catching a little. “They’re gonna shit themselves.”

“Oh, definitely,” Eddie agreed. “We should get back to see that. Also, we should probably go before one of us does actually die of hypothermia.” But he made no move to let Richie go. In fairness, Richie made no move to extricate himself. At least, not until another shiver wracked him. 

“Jesus,” he said, sitting up, and shivered again. Eddie reached up and touched his face, and Richie briefly lost his breath.

“Jesus, Rich, your lips are blue,” Eddie said.

“Thanks,” Richie mumbled, trying to stop his teeth from chattering.

“Let’s get out of here,” Eddie said. He slipped gracefully off the rock into the deeper water and began to half-swim, half-wade towards the shore. Not wanting to be even a little alone out there, Richie followed at once.

They climbed back up the trail to the top of the quarry, which was so much rockier and steeper and narrower than Richie remembered it being, but he pretended it was easy to make Eddie bitch and moan at him, which he did gloriously. In reality Richie was working twice as hard as he wanted to be to keep Eddie off his heels. By the time they got to the top he felt that he’d sweated off the quarry water and picked up an extra layer of grime. At the top they pulled on their filthy clothes, poured little piles of grit out of their shoes and jammed them onto their feet. Richie felt about two sizes too big for everything, too dry and too dirty and too heavy to pull himself out of the water. He thought about the dream again; he wanted to be back there, he wanted the joy and cleanness and weightlessness of it so badly it almost physically ached. 

But it was only a dream, and the walk back to town was silent and long and painfully real. Richie’s feet hurt, and his head hurt, and he wanted a shower like he wanted to breathe, and he wanted to eat more than that. Christ, he was hungry like he’d never been before in his life.

They had just reached the edge of town, the first lights starting to show through the trees and properties creeping in closer to the road, and Richie was trying to muster the fortitude to make it the ten or fifteen minutes it would take them to reach the inn. He was so focused on imagining the him from twenty minutes in the future, who would be in the middle of showering or maybe making a sandwich while he waited for his takeout to arrive, and most importantly would be briefly thinking of the Richie from twenty minutes ago and appreciating the difference between their physical, mental, and emotional states, that he realized that Eddie had gone from a focused-on-walking silence to a working-up-to-say-something silence. Once he’d noticed there was no unnoticing it, so Eddie noticed the change in Richie’s brand of not-talking from lost-in-thought to waiting-for-him-to-say-something. Eddie licked his lips, and Richie looked up from the road for the first time in probably a mile to watch Eddie’s face. He was pale and peaked, hair matted with quarry water and dirt and worse, standing up crazily all over his head; he glanced at Richie and then his eyes slid away nervously.

“What’s up?” Richie asked, unable to take it anymore. They were coming up on the kissing bridge and he had a stupid awful paranoia that Eddie would somehow see the R+E carved into one of the planks and somehow connect those dots, and somehow he would hate Richie rather than just be charmed and kindly flattered that his childhood friend had been afflicted with such an innocent thirteen year old crush. 

Actually, no, he didn’t want the second option either.

“Nothing,” Eddie said, his face twitching like an irritated cat’s. He could be a great liar, but when he wasn’t he was the worst.

“Yeah fucking right,” Richie said. “Tell me, Eds.”

“No, I don’t know,” Eddie said. “I just was thinking…” His gaze drifted up the road, towards the rail where Richie had carved their initials, and he started walking faster, trying to get Eddie to look at him instead. 

“You know,” Eddie said in a voice of such heavy reluctance that Richie found himself slowing down again at once, coming back to listen. “When we were kids.” He looked sideways at Richie and then sort of laughed, and looked at him openly with an expression that all on its own made Richie’s heart kick up the tempo a few notches. “I had the biggest crush on you, you know.”

It struck Richie dumb and speechless for a moment; embarrassingly, he actually had to stop walking and just stand there like an idiot. Then he laughed. It sounded uncomfortable and braying to his own ears, jagged with too much emotion. He made himself start walking again. “Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”

It was everything and nothing that he’d ever wanted to hear. It was terrifying. The thought of talking about it made him want to run away as fast as he could and never look back, although of course he would, if he did: he would do nothing but look back for as long as he was allowed to remember, and would still probably manage it once he forgot again, live his life staring into the dim blank fog of his childhood home trying to remember what he was looking for there.

“God damn it, Richie,” Eddie said. “Pull yourself together. You’re not as tragic as all that.”

“Oh,” Richie said, wheeling on him, “I’m not as tragic as all that? What am I as tragic as, then, Eds, can you let me know? I just need to pull it together? What the fuck is that supposed to mean,” he snapped, and opened his mouth to keep right on going with it, and then Eddie took two strides forward and got himself into Richie’s space, and his voice died in his throat.

“It means I came back for you, idiot,” Eddie snapped. He grabbed Richie by his filthy lapels and said, his voice cracking, “I came back for you. So what are you going to do about it?”

“I,” Richie said, and stopped there, because he couldn’t do it! He couldn't. That was the truth, he couldn’t do anything. He was completely stuck. Thirty years of hiding in fear and hiding without knowing he was hiding, and now that the refrigerator was opened he couldn’t unbend out of the tangle he’d made of himself into to fit in there in the first place. Thirty fucking years. He couldn’t breathe. He said desperately, “_Eddie_.”

“For the love of God,” Eddie said, and pulled Richie down and kissed him.

It was a chaste-ish, teeth-clicking, thirteen-year-old sort of kiss. Richie would have been embarrassed to kiss anyone else like that, but with Eddie it was everything. It was everything. It was unbelievable, actually—unthinkable that the world would give him something this whole, this perfect.

They drew apart, still holding on to each other. Eddie’s eyes were big and dark and worried; he’d lost the gauze somewhere, but the cut on his face was scabbed over. Richie couldn’t see a future where he let go anytime soon. Something terrifying and leaden grew in his mouth.

“I was so scared,” he told Eddie, touching his shoulders, his neck, the ragged edge of his collar and the warmth of his skin, touching his chest where nothing scarred him. Richie didn’t tell Eddie the whole of it, which was that he had wanted to die with him. Something like that, he thought, didn’t need to be said out loud. Maybe he couldn’t have said it if he’d tried. “It was the worst thing,” Richie tried to explain instead, struggling to control his voice. Worse than a missing child poster or a memorial flyer with his face on it, worse than the lumberjack, worse than the rotting man in the silk bomber jacket. He shuddered and pulled Eddie into his arms, pressing his face into Eddie’s neck, trying not to remember how not long ago he’d done the same thing in the most awful and hopeless moment of his entire life. He remembered something easier from that time underground and seized it for a diversion, mumbling into Eddie’s neck, “And also I slapped Bill, and I’m scared he’s going to divorce me.”

“I know,” Eddie whispered, rightly ignoring Richie’s cheap and unconvincing joke. His arms wrapped around Richie so tightly that he couldn’t imagine Eddie ever letting go. “I was scared too. I was so scared. I—I was alone,” he said, his voice soft and panicky, his breaths quick and nervous in Richie’s ear. “For so long. I don’t want to be alone like that again.”

“You won’t be,” Richie said fiercely, a promise he knew he could make only on the impossible night of his dream.

Eddie sighed against him, and then stepped away. Not so far, though, and he reached out and took Richie’s hand before they started walking again. Their fingers interlaced. 

“What do you think is under the world?” he asked quietly, some time later. They’d been walking together in silence, Richie completely and happily absorbed in the pressure of Eddie's fingers against his, the occasional, unpredictable brush of their shoulders or caress of Eddie's thumb against his hand. They were almost back at the inn.

For a moment Richie had the urge to laugh, stop and pull him up short and ask what the fuck that was supposed to mean. But he knew; he knew. 

“I think it’s a turtle,” he said.

“You do?” Eddie’s eyes turned to him, his worried brow furrowing in confusion.

“Yeah,” Richie said. He swung their hands back and forth between them. “I think the world rests on the back of a turtle. A big old cosmic turtle.”

Eddie was starting to smile a little. “Well then, what’s under the turtle?”

“Another turtle,” Richie said, like it should have been obvious. They were climbing the steps of the inn; he looked at Eddie and grinned openly, happier than he could remember being in twenty years.

“And what’s underneath that turtle?” Eddie asked, smiling back with one side of his mouth.

“Eddie,” Richie said, mock dismay wobbling with joy that he couldn’t keep out of his voice. His hand was on the doorknob, and he wondered if the other Losers were on the other side of the door, if they would be there if they opened it—he’d seen everyone’s cars still in the lot —or if they were upstairs in their individual rooms, sitting around waiting for the biggest shocks of their lives. But Richie didn’t open the door yet. He didn’t look away from Eddie. “My dear Eduardo,” he said, “it’s turtles all the way down.” 

Eddie laughed aloud, a bright sound, and impulsively Richie leaned in and kissed him. Eddie kissed him back instantly, his hands coming up to frame Richie’s face, a smile curving his mouth against Richie’s. Richie had the intense and terrifying feeling that his whole life was waiting for him somewhere on the other side, and so when they drew apart he didn’t waste any more time: he turned the handle and opened the door, and together they went in, to the light and warmth inside where their friends were waiting.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks everyone please listen to nightswimming and think about these sad old men with me
> 
> now featuring a sequel [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20714072)


End file.
